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When you got home and open the television, what is the first thing that will greet you? News about the drug involvement of Sen. De Lima, harsh and insulting words of Pres. Duterte, another man have killed because of drugs, another drug laboratory has been being raid, or another kid was being raped by a drug addict. As I watch those kind of news, it made me think, why is it all involved by drugs? Nothing is new. The same story again and again. But what is more alarming than this? I know these passed few months, after Pres. Duterte was being inaugurated as our president, his number one platform about “war against drugs” was started. Extra-judicial killings rose. A lot of people were alarmed by this brutal news. Numbers of killed accused drug addicts, pushers, etc. inflated. I don’t want to be pretentious in this essay, that I know a lot about extra-judicial killings or the law about it. However, 3 things popped out on my head when I heard this news for the first time.

THE GOOD: I know that every time we heard another extra-judicial killing on the news, we feel pity for the victim. We pity them because the cops shot them and didn’t give them another chance to change. Pity them because they also have family like us, and most all, they’re all humans too. It’s really sad to watch the family of the victims crying because their love ones were taken away from them in an inhumane way. They look like the protagonist in a novel. But the thing is, does that pity that we felt towards the victim really worth it or in other words, do they deserve it?

THE BAD: I guess you already have an idea who’s the bad in this story like issue. The cops, because they were the one who perform the drug raid. A lot of people tend to get mad or judge them. They think that the cops did that on purpose. That Pres. Duterte commands them to kill all these drug-related people. Most of us don’t believe them that they did that to protect themselves. Are they saying the truth? Or they just do their jobs? We know that their number one job is to protect us to those kinds of criminals.

And lastly, THE DIRTY: Admit that that all of us have these dirty judgments in our mind. That even though we try to keep it ourselves, it will still spill out eventually. Opinions, perspectives, false judgments, we all have these. Especially in the generation we have today, we can say or post anything in just one click. It’s either we can worsen the situation or we just want to tell our bottled thoughts to everyone. I have no idea why these 3 things come in to my mind. I admit to myself that I’m not a kind of person that is easily alarmed by news, but this one really caught my attention.

I remembered what my professor discussed in Clinical Psychology, he told us about the effects of drugs to our body. It also involves 3 things. DEPRESSION, ANXIETY,and PARANOIA. Drugs are also known as downers. People who are using it will become more depressed. It will bury them more. They thought that drugs can free them from all of their problems but it’s not. Then once that person is already depressed, he/she will become more anxious and paranoid with their surroundings. They always feel that someone wants to kill them. From that explanation, extra-judicial killings make sense to me. If a drug addict is caught by cops, their initial reaction will be aggression. They will fight back. So we can’t blame the cops if they shoot the accused person. Like what I have said, they just do their job. Yes, the due process was being bypassed in this case, but think about it, what if you’re in their situation? I know that you will do something to protect yourself and the people around the area. My professor told us that once a drug addict will always be a drug addict. Yes, there are rehabilitations that could give them treatment and medications. But relapses are possible in this case. Treating people who are substance abused is a lifelong process. It requires a lot of support and guidance from the people around them.

Pres. Duterte was right, our country will not be cleaned if we will not uproot the main cause of our country’s burden. I’m not saying that I am in favor of extra-judicial killings, nor being biased with anyone. What I want to say is that sometimes we have to look from the other side issue, where most people don’t usually see.

It’s my daily routine that you cannot take away from me. The same stupid feeling again and again and again.

My heart is pounding, my sweat glands starting to secrete sweat on my temples, my lips are drying. I lick it a bit then swallowed hard. Trying to control my self not to vomit, I feel dizzy, like the whole thing around me is spinning. I feel sick again. It’s difficult to breathe, as if there’s a scarcity of air that is so expensive to inhale.

Voices inside my head started to debate:

YOU CAN DO IT! YOU CANNOT!

YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A SCARED LITTLE DOG!”

I whimpered and shut my eyes, making them stop. Why do they have to fight? Who will I listen to? They’re like my own phantom.

I’m scared, my body is trembling, I feel my knees weaker and weaker any minute. People I pass through are looking at me like I am another crazy person on their eyes. I’m murmuring positive things, like; “I can make it”, “nothing will happen”.

I ignored them. I look down and continue walking. My earphones is already on high volume, trying to broke my eardrums. The beat of the music I am listening too is jiving with my pounding heart beat. It’s like I am waving inside my living nightmare that I couldn’t escape.

Metacognition. A word that we always encounter but not all of us know the true meaning or understand this. Metacognition came from two words, the prefix meta-, means beyond or change, and cognition, means activity of thinking, understanding, learning, and remembering. So it simply means beyond thinking or changing the way of thinking. The word metacognition was introduced by the psychologist John Flavell in 1970’s. It is the notion of reflecting about one’s thinking can be found in writings dating back to Plato’s era who emphasized the importance of reflecting through dialogue. But what is the exact meaning of metacognition?

Metacognition means is a regulatory system that helps a person undersatnd and control his or her own cognitive performance. When someone talking about metacognition, it refers to the process of stepping back to see what you are doing as if you were someone else observing it, becoming an audience of your own self. It also involves adaptation to improve one’s learning, evaluation, generating strategies and implementing or applying it. John Flavell, as one of the first researcher in metacognition, broke it into two areas. First is the metacognitive knowledge, and the second is the metacognitive regulation. Metacognitive knowledge or Knowledge of Cognition reflect on what we know, thoughts, and even our own intuition, etc. While Metacognitive Regulation or Regulation of Cognition is where we direct our learning and planning the task by monitoring our activities, checking outcomes or assessing our own performance.

For me, as a college student, this two factors can help me improve my learning system, it will help me to evaluate my self, its like watching my self how I am thinking about my thinking. In my own experience, I usually do this whenever I do my hobby, which is writing stories. I used some strategies that help me a lot in making a good story. First is I gather all my idea, thoughts and possible plots in making a story, I wrote it on a paper and then I will start asking my self if my idea will make my story interesting or not, simply making an assumptions, looking forward if my readers will like it or not, don’t be afraid to make a assumptions. Second, I will study if my assumptions will influenced me or my story. Third, if the assumptions does not fit, try to make another one until you find the one that will fit. Fourth, don’t be afraid to make to ask help or information on someone who is advanced to you, these people will help you to improve your skill or knowledge about on what you do. And last, committing mistakes or errors is okay, don’t lose hope.Making errors is part of learning, we get lesson in it, benefit of the error, allow your self to make error.

In having strategies in metacognition, it helps us to become more efficient in our learning in us to gain information, evaluate, and understand. As part of developing one’s cognition, learning how to aware of one’s thinking will direct consciously. Reseachers has shown that one of the key traits good problem solvers possess highly developed metacognitive skills. They know how to recognized flaws in their own thinking, articulate their thoughts and revise their efforts(Brown, Bransford, Ferrera,& Camplone, 1983).

How about you? Do you ever think how can you improve you metacognitive skills? How you think about your thinking?

Rationalism defined as a philosophical view that appeals to reason as a source of knowledge (Ariola, 2014). Rationalist is the one who believed that the route to knowledge is through logical analysis (Sternberg, 2003). Plato is the one who profoundly found the idea of rationalism. Plato stated that reality lives not in the object or perceived by our body senses, but in the idea or abstract thought that an object represent. One of my professors (in philosophy specifically), explained rationalism or being a rationalist in a simple way, he said that rationalist seeks idea or abstract thoughts first before they make an outcome. Rationalism needs critical thinking, logical analysis and deductive reasoning.

Let me share my own experience about this. As a college student, I say that sometimes I used to be a rationalist. Why? Like what Plato’s belief, that you have to think first, analyze everything in a logical and systematic way the things you want to make. One of my hobbies is writing stories, everyone thought that it’s easy, but let me tell you this, it’s not. You may think that this is not related in rationalism, but as I analyze and read the definition of being a “rationalist”, I can say that this experience can also connect for being a rationalist. When you’re writing a story, you have to consider everything. You will think for the character, the setting, and the whole plot of the story. You really have to think and analyze everything before you write. Think how will you start your story, how will it flow when the readers read your story, you need to be skeptical sometimes, and lastly, how will you end it. Because if these steps are not being followed, the story that you made will end up bad or not so good as you want to be. In this simple experience of mine, first, I didn’t know the idea of being a rationalist, I just ignore it. Idea comes into my mind and then I will make an outcome from that idea, as simple as that. Now that I learned what a rationalist is, I think that in every simple thing that I do or did everyday or every time, I choose to be a rationalist without knowing it.

Descartes believed that innate ideas are attributes of the human mind. Without idea or abstract thought, no idea or date could be known men. As a human being, thinking is the one of the reason why we are being called alive or existed, that we are different from the creations that God made. We are using our human mind to learn additional knowledge or idea. Being a rationalist or empiricist is not important, what important is how we learn and gain knowledge, and how will we contribute it to other people. Just like one of Plato’s philosophy: “Ideas are the foundation and justification of scientific knowledge, reality does not changed, for ideas in man are immutable.”

When you search for the definition of Depression in a dictionary, it will give you this answer: it is a condition in which a person feels very sad, hopeless and unimportant, and often unable to live in a normal way.

Depression is one of the most common disorders that affect individual’s ability to perform normal in daily life activities, especially to teens when it comes to their academic performance (Hysenbegassi, Hass, & Rowland, 2005). For me, as a college student, what being said is true, I may not experienced depression but as a youth, I can see from the other teenagers like me that when they are depressed they’re not able to concentrate on what they’re doing, they tend to be alone, and sometimes they have eating problems. Youth experienced depression are nearly of those who are in early adulthood. Thus, episodes of depression occur during their college years (Michael, Huelsman, Gerard, Gilligan, & Gustafson, 2006; Lewinson, Rohde. Klein, & Seeley, 1999). But can depression provoke suicidal attempts to college students?

YES. Depression is one of the major causes of suicide. According to the survey that conducted by the American College Health Association-National College Health Assessment in 2009, suicide is the 3rd leading cause of death for teens and young adults that range in 15-24 years old. Students who are evoked in suicidal thoughts/attempts are mostly related to environmental, inter/intrapersonal, academic and career issues. In other words, both internal and external issues can cause depression and suicidal attempts. But love and academic problems are confirmed to be the main cause of suicide for college students (Chatterjee & Basu, 2010; Furr, Westefeld, Mcconnell, & Jenkin, 2001; Bernard & Bernard, 1982; Schotte & Clum, 1982). Most of the suicide attempts of the college students are they just keep it to themselves because they think that it’s not necessary to tell anyone (Denmark, Hess, Becker, 2012). That’s why it is important that the universities or colleges must be aware on this kind of issues. Lack ok knowledge in protecting college students against auicidal thoughts/attempts can pose a problem to colleges/universities administrators, providers, etc. Because majority of the college students who have suicide thoughts, did not seek professional help. Estimated of 80% of the students who died by suicide never seek/receives counseling from the school (Denmark, et. Al, 2012; Drum, Browson, Burton, Denmar, & Smith, 2009; Gallagher, 2006; Kisch, Leino, & Silverman, 2005; Schwartz, 2006).

Depression and suicide thoughts/attempts shouldn’t ignore, because these two are interrelated to each other. People who has or possessed this kind of behavior must get to a professional or specialist to seek help.

Chatterjee & Basu (2010). Perceived causes of suicide, reason for living and suicidal ideation among student. Journal of the Indian Academic in Applied Psychology, Vol.36, 2, 311-316. Retrieved August 17,2015, from http://medind.nic.in/jak/t10/i2/jakt10i2p311.pdf

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